Six Easy Pieces er-8 Page 10

  Two women in pink and blue dresses were making their way down the street. The one in blue carried a small white cardboard box about the size of a workman’s lunch pail. This box had cardboard handles that folded out from the top.

  I thought about the police. Looking back on it now I realize that I should have called the cops. I could have said that I saw a woman, bound hand and foot, carried into the house. But I was never happy about dealing with the city’s armed thugs. Even though the cowboy was probably guilty I couldn’t call the law in on him until I was sure.

  The ladies were handing two long rectangular bars to a woman standing at the front of the house nearest me. When they came back to the sidewalk I was waiting for them.

  “Excuse me, ladies,” I said.

  The taller one was in the pink dress suit. It was Sunday attire; all that was missing was a hat. She was tall and dark-skinned. There was a gold wedding ring on her finger so I supposed that someone had once found her beautiful. I suspected that that was a long time ago. She had a frown that would give children nightmares.

  “What do you want?” she demanded. It was as if she recognized me as the no-good black sheep of the family and wasn’t about to let me get an inch too close.

  “Are those church chocolates?”

  “Oh yes,” said the shorter woman wearing the powder-blue dress. She was dark too. But she was sweet all the way through. “A big grin and big butt on a black woman and you know I be a happy man,” my uncle Stanley used to profess. He would have been happy seeing what I saw.

  “With almonds?” I asked the friendlier church lady.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You know I love church candy.”

  “This ain’t no tea party, young man,” the lady in pink said. “We’re selling these chocolates.”

  “Hester,” the lady in blue complained. “There’s no need to be rude.”

  “I have a house to take care of, Minne Roland,” Hester replied. “So now, mister, if you would please move—”

  “I would like to buy all of your candies, ladies,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “How many have you got left?”

  “Almost twenty,” Blue Minne replied.

  The bars sold for thirty-five cents a piece. I gave them seven dollars and they thanked me. Hester made a grimace that I was sure was meant to be a smile.

  I walked off toward the cowboy’s house laden with chocolates and high hopes.

  THE FRONT DOOR hadn’t been used much recently. There were spider webs at the corners and leaves sticking out from underneath the welcome mat. There were stains on the peeling white door left from the last rainstorm three months ago.

  I pressed the doorbell. There was no sound from inside.

  I knocked on the door.

  There came the sound of footsteps. But not the heavy-booted feet of the black cowboy I’d been following. The door whined and cracked as it opened. The short honey-brown woman had a wide smile and smaller eyes than JJ’s photograph indicated.

  “Hey y’all,” she said, greeting me with all the friendliness of the country.

  “Hi,” I said, widening my eyes in surprise.

  Misty took my stare as a compliment; it might have been if it were not for my astonishment at her carefree attitude.

  “You sellin’ candy?” she asked.

  “You bet,” I said. “Milk chocolate and almonds for twenty-five cents a bar.”

  “Misty, who you talkin’ too?” The man’s voice was hard and serious.

  The cowboy appeared in the disheveled room behind the young Texan miss. His skin was rough and brown with the strong aura of drab green emanating from underneath. His eyes were brown too but just barely. This cowboy’s ancestors could have well included a rattlesnake or two.

  “Anthony Lender,” I said, remembering the name of a white private I once went to war with. “Sellin’ chocolate.”

  “What you wanna knock on this door for?” he asked me.

  “To sell a pretty young lady somethin’ sweet,” I said.

  Misty smiled at me and the snake pushed her aside.

  “It don’t look like no one live in here,” he said. “Why you wanna come up here?”

  “I saw you drive up when I was across the street goin’ door to door,” I said, stalling for time. “I’m sellin’ chocolate to build the house for our minister. It’s really good chocolate and cheap…”

  While I spoke I reached into the box as if I were going to show him just how good my candies were. But instead of chocolate I whipped out my .38 caliber pistol and hit him in the center of his forehead. As the cowboy fell backward I hit him again on the side of the jaw. He fell heavily and I knew that he was no longer conscious. I pulled the door closed behind me and presented the muzzle of my gun to the once smiling face of Misty.

  “This gun can shout a lot louder than you,” I said. “So I suggest you keep it down and do what I say.”

  Misty was not only pretty, she was smart. She nodded and glanced at her boyfriend.

  “You got some sheets somewhere?” I asked her.

  “In the bedroom.”

  “Show me.”

  She led me through a doorway into a room so small it would not have been large enough to contain a vain woman’s wardrobe. There was a single bed and sheets strewn around it.

  “Take that sheet and bring it back out front,” I commanded.

  She did as I said.

  “Now tear it into five long strips,” I said handing her my pocket knife.

  “We ain’t got no money, mister,” she said as she worked.

  “But you will soon enough won’t you, Misty?”

  She stopped cutting for a second.

  When she was through with the sheets I used the strips to hogtie the cowboy and gag him. When I was through I had Misty sit down on the floor in front of me.

  “You gonna rape me?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “What you want wit’ me an’ Crawford? And how come you know my name?”

  “How much they payin’?”

  “Who?”

  “Clovis and them,” I said, falling into the rhythm of the Texan dialect.

  Misty was good. She looked like and talked like a hick off the back of a watermelon truck, but she knew how to feint and lie.

  “I don’t know no Clovis,” she said, her voice a fraction softer than it had been before.

  “You made the right choice comin’ to L.A., girl,” I said. “But wrong in goin’ in against your half-sister. I know you know Clovis. Clovis is your family too. So now you tell me what’s happenin’ or I’ma make sure you spend your pretty years in jail for extortion.”

  “I didn’t do nuthin’,” she said. “I just been livin’ in this shitty house.”

  “I bet you Clovis owns the deed on this house.”

  “What if she do?”

  “Put that together with Clovis forcing JJ to sign over half her business to her and you got prison stamped all over it.”

  “You can’t prove that.”

  “Come with me,” I said. And we left the tethered cowboy dreaming of money that he would never collect.

  “DID YOU PLAN IT from the beginning?” I asked her on the long drive back to Laurel Canyon.

  “What?”

  “Did you plan to steal your sister’s business when you were writin’ her from down Texas?”

  “No. I didn’t even know she had nuthin’ when I was down there. She’d just write and say how she lived with this old man Mofass and how they loved each other. She said that he was too sick to work but she loved him anyway so I thought that they was poor.”

  “So when did you get in with the plan?”

  “I left Crawford a note tellin’ him that I was comin’ up here. He called Clovis an’ told her. He wanted her to talk me into comin’ back.”

  “Yeah?” I prodded.

  “She told him to get up here and then they all met me at the bus stop in San Diego.”

  “How they know when you gonna get
there?”

  “They’s on’y one bus a day to L.A. from Dallas.”

  “But why would you let them turn you against your sister?”

  “I told you already.”

  “Told me what?”

  “She lied makin’ me think that her an’ her boyfriend was poor. She never sent me no money or tried to help me get on my feet. An’ she stole Clovis’s money in the first place.”

  “So you wanted to steal it back from her?”

  At that question Misty went silent.

  For the rest of the ride she stared out of the window.

  “WHERE WE GOIN’?” she asked when we turned off onto JJ’s road.

  “Where you think?”

  “You said to the police.”

  “I figured I’d skip the constabulary and go straight to the judge,” I said.

  When we got to Mofass’s door, I expected to have to pull JJ off of Misty. But there were no fireworks, no waterworks either. JJ grinned when she saw her missing sister. The smile faded when I told her what was what. JJ didn’t ask why and Misty offered no excuse.

  “Well I guess that’s it,” JJ said when I was through explaining.

  * * *

  I TOOK MISTY back down to Compton and dropped her off about six blocks from her hogtied cowboy.

  On the way home I thought about JJ. She must have been brokenhearted over her sister’s betrayal. Money, I thought, is a harsh master in poor people’s lives. It warps us and makes us so hungry that we turn feral and evil. If Misty and JJ had stayed back home in their poor shacks, they would have been friends for fifty years baking pies and raising children side by side.

  JESUS HAD BOUGHT a sleeping bag with money he’d saved from work. We sat up late into the night talking about my experiences camping out in France and Germany with the small troop I belonged to.

  “Did you kill a lotta Germans?” the bright-eyed boy asked.

  “Yes I did.”

  “Did you hate ’em?”

  “I thought I did–—at first. But after a while I began to realize that the German soldiers and the white American soldiers felt the same about me. I used my rifle a little less after that.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I didn’t really know who it was I wanted to shoot.”

  “So you didn’t kill any more?”

  “I didn’t kill except if I absolutely had to.”

  I showed Jesus how to camp so that nobody could see you. I cautioned him to stay low when he heard something in the bushes.

  “Be careful out there, son,” I said to him. “You know I love you more than anything.”

  * * *

  THE PHONE RANG at two thirty-five.

  “Yes,” I said, expecting it to be Bonnie.

  “Easy,” she cried. “Easy, come quick. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

  I filled an empty mayonnaise jar with water and then drove the car I’d borrowed from Primo toward the canyons. At the base of the hills I got out and made mud from the dirt at the side of the road. I smeared the mud on Primo’s license plates.

  THE DOOR TO THE HOUSE was open. The large living room was strewn with bodies and blood. Clovis was thrown back on the couch so that she was hanging over the backrest. Fitts and Clavell were lying one in front of the other. It seemed as if they had been running at someone but were cut down—–first Clavell and then his brother–—in the middle of their rush.

  Mofass was leaning up against the wall that the brothers had rushed. The .22 caliber pistol was in his hand. JJ was kneeling next to him, trying to pull him up by the arm.

  “Damn criminals,” Mofass said. I could barely hear him.

  “Get up, Uncle Willy,” JJ pleaded. “Get up.”

  “Take her outta here, Mr. Rawlins,” he said. His eyes were so blurry and yellow that they seemed to be melting right out of his head.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Ain’t no time for questions. Take her outta here.”

  When I tried to pull JJ to her feet she clutched Mofass’s arm. Her grip was brittle though and I manged to pull her away.

  “Get his oxygen tank,” I told her.

  While she ran into the other room I interrogated my real estate manager.

  “What happened?”

  “They wanted to steal my property,” he said. “They wanted to hurt my girl. Fuck that. Fuck that.”

  “We got to get you outta here, William,” I said.

  “No, Mr. Rawlins. I got to stay here an’ cover up for the cops. They cain’t know JJ was in on this.”

  I didn’t know for a fact what he meant. But I had my suspicions.

  JJ returned with the oxygen tank and mask. When she held the mask to Mofass’s nose and mouth he sighed. He smiled at his child lover and then shook his head for us to go.

  I dragged JJ to the car.

  “We can’t leave him,” she said as we were driving away.

  “We have to call the police, JJ.”

  “No. He killed them.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I called Clovis after you left. I told her that I decided against lettin’ her in the business. She said sumpin’ but I just hung up. Then, about two hours ago, they all came over with the contracts for me and Uncle Willy to sign. I told ’em no an’ Uncle Willy pretended that he was ’sleep.”

  “Then what.”

  “Fitts started twistin’ my arm like he used to when I was a kid. I guess I screamed and he slapped me. I fell down and heard this sound like a cap gun. I thought maybe it was my nose bone or sumpin’ but then Clovis made this squeakin’ sound. I looked up and seen her holdin’ her chest and then the crackin’ sound happened again and she fell back on the couch. Uncle Willy was standin’ at the do’ with his pistol in his hand. Fitts and Clavell run at him but Uncle Willy cut ’em down. He used one hand to hold himself up on the wall and the other to shoot.”

  “We got to get outta here,” I said.

  “Not without him,” JJ said.

  “He got his oxygen mask,” I reasoned. “When the cops come they’ll call it self-defense. But if you’re here you might get in trouble.”

  I CALLED THE POLICE from a phone booth, telling them that I had heard shots from Mofass’s home. Then I took JJ down near Jackson Blue’s apartment on Ozone Street in Venice.

  I parked down the street and called him from a booth.

  “JJ’s in trouble,” I said to the sleepy con man. “If you got a woman in there with you send her away. Take JJ in and make her feel comfortable. If the police ask, you tell ’em she was with you for the night.”

  “Ain’t no woman up in here, Easy. Send her on.”

  I watched as JJ walked down the block to Jackson’s house and then I went home to bed—if not to sleep.

  THE MORNING EXAMINER had the triple murder and suicide on the front page. The police, tipped off by an anonymous call, went to the secluded Laurel Canyon home where they found the four corpses. Mofass had given his life for Jewelle.

  She returned home that morning and told the police that she’d left early to see her boyfriend. She also informed them that Clovis had been pressing to get back into business with them. The contracts Clovis wanted them to sign seemed to prove the story.

  My name was not mentioned. And I have no idea where Misty and Crawford went. Jewelle stayed in her home. Jackson didn’t move in but they still see each other.

  I went back to work the next day wondering how long it would be before my past showed up and put me into an early grave.

  Lavender

  IT WAS A TUESDAY MORNING, about a quarter past eleven. The little yellow dog hid in among the folds of the drapes, peeking out now and then to see if I was still in the reclining living room chair. Each time he caught sight of me, he bared his teeth and then slowly withdrew into the pale green fabric.

  The room smelled of lavender and cigarette smoke.

  The ticking of the wind-up clock, which I had carried all the way from France after my discharge, wa
s the only sound except for the occasional passing car. The clock was encased in a fine dark wood, its numerals wrought in pale pink metal—copper and tin most probably.

  The cars on Genesee sounded like the rushing of wind.

  I flicked my cigarette in the ashtray. A car slowed down. I could hear the tires squealing against the curb in front of our house.

  A car door opened. A man said something in French. Bonnie replied in the same language. It was a joke of some sort. My Louisiana upbringing had given me a casual understanding of French, but I couldn’t keep up with Bonnie’s Parisian patter.

  The car drove off. I took a deep drag on the Pall Mall I was nursing. She made it to the front step and paused. She was probably smelling the mottled yellow-and-red roses that I’d cultivated on either side of the door. When I’d asked her to come live with us she said, “As long as you promise to keep those rosebushes out front.”

  The key turned in the lock and the door swung open. I expected her to lag behind because of the suitcase. She always threw the door open first and then lifted the suitcase to come in.

  My chair was to the left of the door, off to the side, so the first thing Bonnie saw was the crystal bowl filled with dried stalks of lavender. She was wearing dark blue slacks and a rust-colored sweater. All those weeks in the Air France stewardess uniform made her want to dress down.

  She noticed the flowers and smiled but the smile quickly turned into a frown.

  “They came day before yesterday.”

  Bonnie yelped and leapt backward. The little yellow dog jumped out of hiding, looked around, and then darted out through the open door.

  “Easy,” she cried. “You scared me half to death.”

  I stood up from the chair.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought you saw me.”

  “What are you doing home?” Her eyes were wild, fearful.

  For the first time I didn’t feel the need or desire to hold her in my arms.

  “Just curious,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I took two steps toward her. I must have looked a little off wearing only briefs and an open bathrobe in the middle of a workday.

  Bonnie took a half-step backward.

  “The flowers,” I said. “I was wondering about the flowers.”

  “I don’t understand.”